[[ This file from Adra, http://www.mhada.info ]]

==== Flash! ====

Recent news, observations, and Adra updates. By,

Martha Adams

[] 2012Feb22. I've started a cycle of work to
review Adra's structure, making it more the same throughout. This begins as I
finish moving my workplace out of Cygwin Linux running in Microsoft Windows,
into a Slackware Linux environment. When I have reviewed Adra and spiffed it
up a little, I'll move on to a next work cycle of major updating and
development of Adra's content.

[] 2012Feb14. My observations from last November
look all too true today. Our Democrat President has seemed, all thru his
term, subtle and Republican; and only as election time approaches, does he
move -- a little -- on the corrections his convincing PR spoke of before his
election in 2008. His old/new objectives that he advocates now, timed to
political opportunism, do not connect appropriately and by need, to America's
long term future. Which our President, among all of us, is best placed and
should be looking and planning most for. In the mean time, history repeats
itself as Obama sharply reduces all space work -- to "save money."

[] 2011Nov27. Edit, refresh, update, restructure
Adra's files. As I look at my work here, I see lots of opportunity for
improvement. In the mean time, affairs in Washington seem to be moving from
bad to worse, as the assaults upon the public good from the Republicans, are
only weakly resisted by the Democrats. Further, events renew the question,
"Are those two political parties, actually twoseparate parties;
or do those both work from the same one unelected, secret, and abundantly
financed back-office group?"

[] 2011Aug30. Edit and refresh Adra files. Updating
and new work for 'Culture, Economics, and Politics.'

[] 2011Jly07. What to believe? See, TheEconomist, 2011 July 2-8, several pieces.

News out of Washington is likely to feature large PR elements, so as the
Shuttle is terminated without any followup program, it's well to look for
other fact and opinion. If you listen to our politicians and to those hired
to speak (nicely) of them, America in space is appropriate and healthy.

Never mind the curious idea that seven or more trillions of dollars over
ten years and ongoing now; or more yet into other Middle East wars and into
upsets elsewhere, is good somehow. As vs around half a trillion dollars over
thirty years for the Shuttle in space, said to be a killing and pointless
expense. Never mind the breaking up and dissipation of what was the Shuttle's
industrial base (and before that, Constellation and Apollo and ...). Never
mind the educated and skilled workers, tested and practiced in the demanding
space environment, out jobhunting now with an eye to restarting new careers
somewhere else. Never mind....

[] 2011Jun10. Update Redux node.

[] 2011May10. Redux node is about complete.

[] 2011Mar06. Adra's top node updated.

[] 2011Feb17. Writing and updates including
Political and Redux (which is much more developed now).

It's troubling to watch current television news and see "Made in America"
guns and tanks and tear gas grenades so busy in the unrest there. (Those
"friendly" governments over there don't look too great, either. Is "Birds of
a feather, flock together," telling us something?) If the money that made all
that military hardware had rather, gone up to space and built settlements
there, today's world would be something else entirely. And our today's
children could look ahead to far better lives than they will, in fact, see in
their time.

[] 2010Dec03. Recent news has me thinking about the
immense practical difference between a dream and an objective.
And about how very easily, the one gets confused with the other. It's a major
part of how, as a country, we suckered-in ourselves to today's potentially
deadly American Problem.

Which American Problem is in part, America's huge military, whose cost
exceeds the combined military costs of the nextfourteen
countries in a ranked list.[mil] (Those fourteen include
Russia and China.)

But another part of the American Problem is a disparate lot of people and
money hustling each one after their own individual vision of doing something
Out There, off-Terra. They are chasing their private dreams, that's what that
finally amounts to. Otherpossibilityexists. If you
imagine yourself two centuries from now (assuming today's state of things
doesn't get to where it seems to be going), and you look around at how things
are there, what might you see?

You might see our local Solar System with people all across it: industry,
culture, communication; an immense social network. And you might see Terra
with frontiers again to absorb its young peoples ambitions and future
possibility, relaxed away from today's intense and bitter zero-sum conflicts.
Which are taking us to a future most of us don't want[ftr] and which certainly won't be any one or another of the
simplified and unchanging utopias, without any science and technology, that
our religious ideologs imagine.

(I'm no candidate for such a fate! I think that in far less than the
projected eternity in such a place, I'd feel it was a well made hell.)

I think there's a plausible future for us, for our today's Terra. We can
see it from here. That is where we are going, if we go anywhere
Out There. (I think if we don't go Out There, we get near-total Terran
systems crash and human die-off.) So if we can usefully see where we are
going, why not narrow-down from all those disparate activities and focus on
gettingthere? Why not move on from dreams and set ourselves to
anobjective? After all, it worked for Apollo.

Options exist right now to do that. These options are easily graded to all
ages of people, from kindergarten to post-retired. We could be doing a lot of
computersimulations and gaming to identify the principal
possibilities and risks to build communities and a culture Out There. And
these activities would develop a social base of people who know something
useful of the practical problems to it. This is the same idea Robert Zubrin
of the Mars Society has been doing in recent years with his analog Mars
settlements. This idea expands easily. It could even restore America from
its present status as a troublesome and offensive dead-weight to world
affairs, to world leader again.

[] 2010Nov10. Adra's top page is much improved now;
with smaller changes down thru Adra. I have lately checked-out several Web
sites and I see that frequently, they just aren't very readable. (Examples:
small gray text on black background; or, an extremely ornamental font.) I
think that having something to say, I want to avoid placing complexity and
meaningless decoration between my message and the reader. I've thought upon
this topic and I've arrived at some ideas.

I apply some of those ideas here. My new node, 'Redux,' sets out some of
how I made Adra and why I do it the way I do it. 'Redux' is in construction
now, with completion and improvement to follow over time.

[] 2010Oct24. Set1 Settlements topic is expanded
into five: Set0 -- Set4, but the Set1 topic is not changed. Also, copy
editing around Adra. This world is changing (I did not say 'improving') which
calls for updating here.

[] 2010Sep06. Copy editing. New files posted into
the Politics and Political Action section. (Still draft.)

[] 2010Jan30. Updated: in Brass Tacks, Settlements;
this Flash page. And. At this writing, it appears NASA must terminate its
Ares and Constellation work, and also end projects toward re-establishing a
Lunar connection. But (in some circles) joy, Joy! More money for wars.

[] 2010Jan25. Updated: Quotes, adding one based
upon a Herbert Stein comment; added a book pointer to my Brass Tacks: Tripod
piece.

[] 2009December10. Both Augustine reports,
separated about two decades in time, point to the same central problem about
money for NASA. Namely, goals are set and then too little money is provided
against costs to reach those goals.

I think this ongoing systemic problem tells us something. We, well, some
of us, are working to bring humans into space. This outward advance, once
well begun, seems deliberately terminated. Why is that? In my piece I
discuss what I see behind the public and published reality. I once believed
the physics, engineering, and cost to get up out of our gravity well was our
hardest obstacle. Today, I think differently. See my "Golden Tripod" here in Adra.

[] 2009November17. Did Augustine 2 (2009 October)
miss something? They discuss a local, a Terra orbiting space station's great
value for space work. But their projections seem to exclude today's ISS which
is out there now. I think there's a place in the future for today's
ISS, given some corrected details. I discuss that in "The ISS?"

[] 2009October29. Whoever is thinking about
off-Terra settlements wants to study the two Augustine Reports closely. They
are a compact introduction to what's going on that (hopefully) will eventually
get us humans off Terra. BeReminded! That in studying a
document such as this, what's not there requires as much attention as what is,
but it's harder to read. Notable in this second Augustine Report is nowhere
does it reach more definitely into the future than to mention "...charting a
path for human expansion into the solar system," page 33. Nor does it touch
on reasons for America's erratic and shambling movement into an expectable
future.

These omissions are not a failure of the people who wrote the Augustine
Reports. Their duty was to describe, at a level of great abstraction,
whatistoday and something of how we came here. Not
where to go in the future. I think they did that very well indeed. Today,
whoever might attempt useful contribution to achieving off-Terra settlements,
wants detailed understanding of the concise summaries that are the Augustine
Reports. (Among other works. I'm developing Adra materials about that.)

Now it comes: How are we going to fill in the blanks? The future? As I
look back at the Settlements Program I briefly outlined in my Brass Tacks INGD
series, I don't see need yet to update it.

[] 2009October25. The Augustine Commission's Report
Preface contains a few words about their lack of bias. Wrong, wrong, wrong!
Because, there were no sciencefictionwriters there.
Science fiction is the literature of speculation about reality and the future.
The Augustine Committee may be Wheels when in their offices, but here, they
were in deeply over their heads. They needed those people who reallydo divergent thinking. Outside the box. Who do it the hard way: they
write salable science fiction from what they think. Without this necessary
resource the Augustine Commission's report is thus, much less than it might
have been.

I think I'll soon be writing a Brass Tacks piece on this topic.

And, I propose that asap, we need several of our best hard science
fiction authors to meet and fill in the misperceptions and large blanks left
in the Augustine Commission's Report.

[] 2009Oct23. The large and Final Augustine Report
was released yesterday to the public. There are now two Augustine Reports out
there: Summary (2009 Sep) and Final (2009 Oct / yesterday).
They can be downloaded as pdf files:

These *.pdf files are very readable using Adobe's reader. Suggestions: 1)
Choose the 'Continuous' View option; 2) Choose a larger than default page
print size; and 3) Track interesting page numbers and use 'Shift-Ctl-n' to get
there.

A version of the Summary (September) appears early in the Final Report.

BeReminded the Commission's Report does not set policy. It
is a large significant Work directed to bureaucratic and other circles. It is
'expert' (in a bureaucratic sense) and its perceptions of style and fact will
be with us for decades to come. That is, it will become history and it will
be referenced many times in coming decades. To understand this Work in its
implied perspectives and to say anything useful about it, read, think, read
again; repeat cycle as required. Hop to it!

[] 2009Oct19. I've been thinking about Adra's
Topics area, which contains among other things some talks I've done or have
been thinking about. Now I'm developing new materials for it.

[] 2009Oct06. OK on the Augustine "summary", how
about the Report? Tongue hanging out gets kind of dry after a while. When is
someone in Washington going to officially say something?

While we're waiting for some resolution to appear, let's consider two
relevant matters: 1) Good news generally travels fast. 2) It's mighty
interesting to compare costs of an American space settlements program, vs the
money magnitudes getting heaved out of Washington to support two questionable
wars; many banks; assorted businesses "too big to fail;" etc etc. One must
ask, have those people in Washington even noticed Out There with all its
immense future potential, actually exists?

[] 2009Sep19. Thanks to PK for clueing me in to an
uncommonly large, useful, graphic, and information-packed Web site. I'm
saying this is a great piece of work. Much more nice to look at than
my Adra. See,

It's by Paul Spudis from Digg, dated 2009 Sep 15. It is one of the many
Augustine Commission oriented pieces that I look for during this 2009 Fall
season.

This is a detail, but I think it's potentially a large detail. Word
constructions carry background. For example, look at the phrase here in
Spudis, "...the Moon" and ask yourself, how would the message be different if
he had said, "...Luna"? ??

[] 2009Sep12. This week, the Augustine Commission
has released an "Executive Summary" of their coming report. "Hopeful" detail
noted: "Return to the Moon before this century is out...."

This Summary offers no change in bureaucratic thinking to date of space as
a vaguely perceived, insignificant region for "exploration" to no particular
objective. I recognized no discussion about America exporting settlements
with their cultural, industrial and business ecologies. Or about the extended
future (there is talk the ISS could be discarded as soon as 2015). None of
Zubrin's excellent testimony at Augustine (and all the other work that he has
done) gets any mention at all.

[] 2009Sep10. Added new topic area 'Flash!'
into Adra.

=== Notes, Resources, and Pointers ===

[mil] American Military and "Security" blackholes.

America's acknowledged military spending roughly equals the combined totals
of China, France, UK and Russia, plus that of ten additional countries.
This spending, reduced by one-half, would still generously exceed that of
China, France, UK and Russia combined. See, http://www.globalissues.org/article/75/world-military-spending.

Not discussed here but very near to 'Military' in its character, staffing,
and consequences, is 'Security.' For both, their money costs seem to rise
very easily but only extreme forces and measures lower those costs. As vs
'Space' and related matters, which seem little recognized despite their
immense future significance, and are easily thrown away. Politicians make
lousy engineers! And if they actually get something right, that's an
accident.

[ftr] About that Future....

This prospect is very visible to those thinking about the future, and some
of them have published writings about it. Classics. See: George Orwell,
1984; Anthony Burgess, AClockworkOrange (and
movie by same name); Frederick Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth,
Gladiator-At-Law; Harry Harrison, MakeRoom, MakeRoom (which became the movie SoylentGreen). See also, and certainly not least, books by: James Bamford,
ThePuzzleFactory; Bruce Sterling, TheHackerCrackdown; Cory Doctorow, LittleBrother.
Among many works by these and others.

How our American future can go wrong is old news, emphasized by current
events in Washington and lately, by Wikileaks materials released to the
public. (WeneedWikileaks, and others like them, vs the
corruption that always develops under secrecy!)

Does it occur to anybody in Washington, that their business is to
manage America toward an uncertain and challenging future, not to compete as a
noisy rabble around a feeding trough of money, narrow religious ideology, and
ephemeral personal power?